NEW YORK, NY – FEBRUARY 19: Boxes of Pop-Tarts sit for sale at the Metropolitan Citymarket on February 19, 2014 in the East Village neighborhood of New York City. Kellogg, maker of Pop-Tarts, has announced that it will only buy palm oil – a minor ingredient in Pop-Tarts – from companies that don’t destroy rainforests where palm trees are grown. Palm oil is used in many processed foods.

To paraphrase a familiar expression, “Breakfast pastries don’t kill people, people do.” That’s the implicit justification for the so-called “Pop-Tart bill” that was recently approved by a Florida House education committee.

That unofficial title is derived from the crime of a 7-year-old schoolboy in Maryland who was suspended for, essentially, playing with his food. It seems the lad artfully bit around his breakfast pastry so that it resembled a firearm.

Is this any way to treat a budding Auguste Rodin? The boy was probably fortunate that some more imaginative school monitor didn’t perceive it as resembling the shape of something that could have gotten him busted for sexual harassment.

This kind of thing has become a bizarre epidemic in public schools. Students have been punished for merely drawing pictures of guns, toting tiny plastic guns on key chains, or making (obviously non-functioning) guns out of Lego blocks. In another Florida school, a boy was suspended for pointing his finger like a gun in a game of cops and robbers, which school administrators judged to be an act of violence.

No, it wasn’t. It was make believe, not violence. Big difference.

Moreover, if the kid was playing the role of a cop in that game, it was a simulation of crime prevention, a good thing. Public-school security officers protecting children from intruders carry guns, as do members of President Obama’s Secret Service detail. That’s a good thing, too, in a violent world.

Under current Florida law, the state mandates that local school districts take a zero tolerance approach regarding anything even remotely connected to weapons. That term, “zero tolerance,” has been the devil’s playpen for public school bureaucrats across the country, so terrified about underreacting that they’re driven to absurd overreactions.

In yet another Florida case, a high school girl who was discovered with a pink plastic water pistol in the back seat of her car was blocked from walking in her graduation ceremony.

The Pop-Tart bill, which was sponsored by Republican Dennis Baxley, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, seeks to temper the knee-jerk rush to judgment by hypersensitive school boards and school administrators with a long-overdue dose of common sense. It’s one thing to have zero tolerance for schoolchildren who would bring real firearms to their classrooms. Miniature symbols of firearms that couldn’t possibly be mistaken for an actual firearm or representations of firearms on T-shirts are another matter.

Schools aren’t utopian islands of tranquility insulated from the cruel outside world. Surely, the school shootings have tragically demonstrated that. Exuberant children and adolescents — mostly boys — don’t live in a public-school vacuum. They play with toy guns at home, watch action movies and play violent video games. If you forcibly replaced their toy gun with a doll, they’d pretend the doll is a rifle. Some of them will grow up to be soldiers like their dads or moms. That’s also a good thing.

Colorado and other states can learn something from Florida. If a kid inadvertently runs afoul of a trigger-happy rule against paranoid gun symbolism, don’t call the cops, make a federal case out of it or suspend him from school. Just take him aside, calmly talk to him about it, call his parents if need be and settle it out of court, so to speak.

Public schools justifiably come down hard on bullying these days. They ought to stop bullying their own students over innocent child play.

Freelance columnist Mike Rosen’s radio show airs weekdays from 1:00-3:00 p.m. on 850-KOA.